Plus belle la vie is a French daily soap opera released on August 30, 2004 and broadcast Monday through Friday on France 3 before the early evening show. The series, which recounts the day-to-day life of the inhabitants of the fictional Mistral neighborhood in Marseille, has become a phenomenon by addressing social issues that until now have rarely been addressed in tricolor fiction: marriage for all, GPA, transidentity… After a few shy starts and settings deemed not exciting enough, the writers quickly decided to introduce new locations, like the police station, and put a slightly police spin on the purring series. Serial killers, mobsters and madmen make their entrance in the casting. The daily life of the inhabitants of the Mistral then becomes much less peaceful. Viewers are taking off, reaching a peak of about seven million viewers in the 2000s, but dipping to 2.7 million viewers in the 2021-2022 season. An erosion that led France Télévisions to announce the end of the soap opera after 18 years of broadcast. “Plus belle la vie will have marked the history of French television”, however, boasted the head of France Télévisions, Delphine Ernotte, noting that the soap opera “has accompanied the daily life of millions of French people”, “it dared to approach without taboos”. our lives and makes the evolutions of our society resonate”. Nearly 600 people worked each year on the series and 3,232 actors in total, to which must be added the extras. Each day, the editing teams produced a 26-minute episode , which imposed a very sustained rhythm and disproportionate to the rhythms of non-daily series and cinema.The last episodes are broadcast on Friday, November 18, 2022 on France 3, which produces the series with the company Newen.
Source: BFM TV
